This blog has officially been in existence for one year, since we published our intro post on August 28, 2015. It’s been a fun year for Adversion. Every week we get together at a local cafe and work on our posts and argue about Gilmore Girls. And we’ve published some things we’re really proud of, from fanwanky TV recaps to “short” posts on whatever we’re reading that week (that often turn into essay-length screeds).

Here are the top ten most popular posts we’ve published in our first year:

The Affair is at its very best when it’s skewering privileged white male literary darlings through the ever-insufferable Noah Solloway, our resident aspiring Great American Novelist. In between name-dropping Jonathan Franzen, Philip Roth, and, of course, the sagacious Ernest Hemingway, Noah says things like “As a straight white man, I am automatically disqualified from winning the PEN/Faulkner… it’s impossible to be a man in 2015!” and uses Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole Krauss’s divorce attorney because “now they live in adjacent brownstones in Brooklyn!”Continue reading →

alison

We open on Alison waking up alone in Noah’s bed, right after her perspective is introduced as “Part Three,” which establishes this episode as a direct companion to the premiere. I wonder if this season will continue to tell four-part narratives, or whether some stories will only be told from two characters’ perspectives. In spite of the lackluster quality of this episode, I thought exploring this day from four different viewpoints allowed for richer and more challenging storytelling, especially since several scenes in this episode dropped hints about whether Noah or Helen’s accounts were closer to the truth (hint: it’s literally never Noah), but we’ll get to that.

Waking up alone is never symbolic of anything good, let’s just put it that way.

When The Affair premiered last fall, it was one of the best shows I had ever seen. The Rashomon-style format was the gimmick, along with the wildly misleading posters of Dominic West and Ruth Wilson getting sexy in a pool, but the execution was anything but gimmicky, as the first few episodes utilized the premise to its full potential. Every subtle yet glaring discrepancy within the emotionally charged memories was attributable to a cannily observed limitation of individual perception, whether the result of personality traits, class, gender, etc. The result was an incisive, often devastating exploration of human frailty, cognitive dissonance, and self-deception.